The rules were clear when she was growing up: Women were not allowed to fly U.S. military aircraft. But that was not going to stop Rosemary Bryant Mariner.

The daughter of a Navy nurse and an Air Force pilot who had died in a plane crash when she was 3, Mariner made it her goal to be as qualified as possible to fly in the armed services. She got her private pilot's license at 17. Then she got her aeronautics degree from Purdue University in 1972 when she was 19.

Incidents of sexual assault at U.S. military academies spiked nearly 50 percent during the last school year despite years of focus on the issue and declarations of zero-tolerance, according to results of a survey conducted by the Pentagon.

The number of students reporting unwanted sexual contact totaled 747 during the 2017-18 academic year compared with 507 in 2015-16, according to anonymous surveys of cadets and midshipmen. Unwanted sexual contact ranges from groping to rape.

"We’re disheartened and disappointed that the things and the strategies that we’ve employed just really aren’t getting the results that we want," Nathan Galbreath, deputy director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, told USA TODAY on Thursday.

The Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump's transgender military ban to go into effect on Tuesday, dealing a blow to LGBT activists who call the ban cruel and irrational.

The Justices did not rule on the merits of the case, but will allow the ban to go forward while the lower courts work through it.

The Justices did not rule on the merits of the case, but will allow the ban to go forward while the lower courts work through it. The four liberal justices on the Court objected to allowing the administration's policy banning most transgender people from serving in the military to go into effect.

The commander of a Navy submarine was relieved of duty last summer after admitting to investigators that he paid for “female accompaniment” while the boat was in port in the Philippines.

Capt. Travis Zettel was relieved of duty in August following a loss of confidence in his ability to command the fast attack submarine USS Bremerton, which is now tied up in Bremerton for decommissioning.

The incident occurred March 1 while the sub was ported in Subic Bay, according to documents released to the Kitsap Sun under a federal Freedom of Information Act request. NCIS agents interviewed a tipster to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s hotline that Zettel had told him and another sailor at a hotel pool that Zettel had “requested/ordered ten girls to arrive at the hotel.” Later, at dinner, the sailor saw Zettel with around 10 “provocatively dressed females outside the front door of the hotel.”

The US-led coalition in Syria has begun withdrawing troops, a military official has said, after days of back and forth over Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of a rapid drawdown of the US presence in the country.

Col Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, said the process of deliberate withdrawal from Syria had started, but declined to comment on specific timetables or movements.

There were no other details, and it was not immediately clear how many vehicles or whether any troop units had withdrawn.

Two Marines and a Navy corpsman are under investigation in the death of a Lockheed Martin contractor in northern Iraq.

The New York Times reported the American contractor was severely wounded in a scuffle on New Year’s Eve in Erbil, Iraq, and was transported to Landstuhl, Germany, where he was pronounced dead Friday.

The Daily Beast identified the Lockheed contractor as Rick Rodriguez, a former Green Beret with nearly twenty years of service in the Army.

“Lockheed Martin was saddened to learn of the loss of one of our employees, who was fatally injured while supporting Special Operations Forces within the Operation Inherent Resolve area of operations in a non-combat related incident,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement.

A powerful federal appeals court in the nation's capital sided with the Trump administration Friday on its military transgender ban, but other courts' blockades of the policy remain in effect.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the partial ban announced by the Pentagon, but never implemented, should not have been blocked by a district court while it was being challenged.

The three judges on the panel were appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.